Denying Denial

In an interview with Sylvère Lotringer, Paul Virilio proposes building what he calls a “Museum of Accidents” to demonstrate that accidents are intrinsic to contemporary technological systems of social organization. ¹ Virilio says that “Each invention creates the possibility of a specific failure”: the train creates the derailment; the ship creates the shipwreck; the airplane creates the plane crash; and the car creates the car crash. ² As Virilio sees it, the problem is that these accidents are coded as anomalies in an otherwise functioning system, which has the effect of containing the accident as an aberration—an abject disruption of the system instead of part of the system itself—“something that shouldn’t have happened and would take everyone by surprise.” ³ The Museum of Accidents would not only commemorate accidents as “integral” to a technological society but also be organized experientially so that visitors to the museum would have to perform the accident in some sense as they move through the museum. Virilio argues that a Museum of Accidents is necessary because “the accident has to be exposed, to play on words: exposing oneself to accident or exposing the accident. The major accident is the Medusa of modernity. To look Medusa in the face, you have to use a mirror. Its face has to be turned around, and this is the aim of the Museum of Accidents.” ⁴ If such a Museum were created, Virilio says, the accident might begin “to have a place in history, through its memory”; it might begin “to have a place not simply as an accident, but as an element that runs parallel to positivity.” ⁵